Displaced children and youth are among the most marginalized groups worldwide, and face major challenges in accessing quality education. Only 60 percent of refugee children and youth attend primary school, compared to 90 percent of children globally, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

Governments and humanitarian and development partners increasingly recognize the need to adopt risk reduction strategies, and plan for displaced children and youth to access quality education. Crisis-sensitive planning, including in displacement situations, can support risk prevention and reduction measures that cover foreseeable, recurrent emergencies, as well as sudden-onset disasters or conflicts. Effective coordination between government agencies and humanitarian and development partners can help ensure equitable and efficient use of resources and encourage collaboration.

In an effort to develop countries’ capacities and provide an opportunity for knowledge sharing, IIEP has developed this online course to help participants analyse and reflect on how education authorities can address forced displacement and integrate crisis risk reduction into their own education sector planning processes.

Objectives

The overall objective of this course is to reinforce the capacity of participants to analyse the impact of risks and integrate measures to address displaced populations in national education sector planning processes.

By the end of the nine weeks, participants should be able to:

analyse risks of conflict, natural hazards, and forced displacement that impact their country’s education sector, and identify capacities that are already in place to respond to and prevent the impact of crisis;

identify opportunities for coordination between humanitarian and development activities in their country;

examine existing and proposed policies in their country, including for displaced populations, in order to respond to risks that could affect the education system;

identify programmes and build stakeholder support;

generate a cost estimation, use scenarios to assess the feasibility of policies, and identify sources of financing;

develop measurable and realistic indicators and identify the sources of information necessary for monitoring and evaluation.

In addition, participants will produce an action plan for the institutionalization of planning for crisis risk reduction and displaced populations in their respective education sector planning processes.

Participants' profiles

The course is open to teams of staff (4–6 members) from ministries of education and personnel from humanitarian and development partner organizations working in educational organization, planning and management, including education for displaced populations. By working together in country teams consisting of representatives from MoEs, UN agencies, and NGOs, it is hoped that the course will help lead to improved coordination between humanitarian and development stakeholders. The participation of female professionals is highly encouraged.